Monday, September 20, 2010

Pumpkin Spice Muffins

It's finally autumn. I love wearing handmade socks, pulling up the hood of my sweatshirt during early morning walks, warming my fingers over the steam rising from a cup of tea. It's time again for soup, squash, and warming spices like cinnamon and nutmeg. It's time to get out the oven mitts and get back to baking.

Inspired by my recent success with zucchini muffins, I swapped out applesauce for canned pumpkin, added brown sugar and maple syrup, and warmed up the flavors. The ingredient list is long, but it's worth the effort for gluten-free muffins this moist and cozy. These muffins aren't overly sweet, but if you'd like to, you could use a crumb or sugar topping, or substitute chocolate chips for the dried fruit.

As with the zucchini muffins, if you don't want to bake 18 at once, spoon the extra batter into lined muffin cups and place it in the freezer. Once the batter is frozen, remove the cups and store them vapor-proof freezer bags until ready to use. When you're ready to use them, just pop the frozen batter into a muffin tin, and increase the baking time by 10 minutes.

Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Whisk together wet ingredients in a medium bowl. Pour wet ingredients into the dry and stir until combined. Stir in nuts and dried fruit. Distribute batter evenly among 18 muffin cups.

Bake for 22-25 minutes. Muffins are done when a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean. Leave muffins in the pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack. Let cool at least 30 minutes before eating, or they will stick to the liners.

You could probably reduce the sugar by half, at least, or replace some of it with maple syrup or agave. Give it a try and let me know how it turns out! The pumpkin muffins don't taste very sweet; the zucchini muffins are a little lighter and sweeter.